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On the Road to Weapons of Mass Destruction

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written Friday, February 23 2007 21:41Profile#0Chimpanzees making spears are on the road to making weapons of mass destruction. We now get to see evolution in action as lower primates gear up for the next level of weapon technology. They may be a few thousand years behind us, but they have figure out to insert pointy end into opponent.

No reaction from President Bush on a new weapons race since they don't produce a significant amount of US oil.

written Friday, February 23 2007 21:44ProfileHomepage#2
Besides, they're in Africa. No one in America cares about Africa. They could have multiple Holocausts, and it wouldn't even make the front page here.

written Saturday, February 24 2007 00:52Profile#4
Fixed the broken link.

There's plenty of oil in Africa, especially off the western coast. I put this up because it shows how we got the way we did. Now some of our closer primate relatives (unless you believe in intelligent design) our following our path to mass destruction.Posts: 4643 |
Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00

written Tuesday, February 27 2007 20:17Profile#12
Excalibur claimed absence of belief in evolution, not belief in the falsity of evolution. Technically there is no belief to justify. Technicalities aside, why be curious? Do you think Excalibur's justification for believing the falsity of evolution would surprise you? I'm sure you could come up with four or five possible justifications in advance, and Excalibur's would be one of those. What does the curiosity arise from?

written Wednesday, February 28 2007 16:24Profile#14
I'd like to try my hand at this...

1. And there are practically an infinite amount of worlds in all of existence. And our world is one of them.2. Of course not. We live for only a puny 70-120 years. Evolution takes thousands of years, or even millions.3. Hundreds of theories? I thought they all pretty much agreed that when an advantageous trait happened to occur, creatures with it had a greater chance of breeding, and thus passing it on.4. We formed from soup? I'm pretty sure we formed from single-celled organisms over billions of years. Just because scientists can't make amino acids doesn't mean nature can't.5. Some aren't clear, while others clearly are...clear.6. Nononononono. The end result is not planned, as this suggests. They didn't jam against each other and hoped to create a human! It was completely random that anything happened, and it's come a long way.7. That's because even thousands of generations would create very few differences. These traits start out very, very small (normally). It takes millions of generations for them to develop.8. Life has existed for billions of years. How are we too complex for billions of years of evolution?9. Where's the evidence for Christianity? I don't see any. And I've read a version of the Bible.10. I think you're confusing theory and hypothesis. A scientific theory is one that has yet to be disproved by science itself. Evolution is one of those.

1. Chances of the whole theory happening are infinitely small.2. Creatures have slight mutations from generation to generation, but I've never seen an amphibian break out of a fish egg. See 7.3. Evolutionist scientists can't make up their mind, there are a couple hundred THEORIES of evolution.4. Scientists are incapable of creating at least of the amino acids essential to life; these amino acids have only been created by life itself. So the idea that organisms formed in a "soup" is very unlikely.5. Fossil records aren't very clear.6. Amino acids must be in the right order to be the correct proteins. Even with a short chain of protein with 400 amino acids, the chance of all the amino acids to connect in that order is 1 in 10 to the 24th power.7. A scientist by the name of Francis Hitching conducted an experiment where he bred thousands of generations of fruit flies. Some flies had genetic mutations, but none of the offspring were anything but your simple annoying fruit fly.8. Even though a lot of animals are similar to other animals, living creatures (especially humans) are much too complex to "evolved" in the amount of time evolutinist scientists say that life has been around.9. Lots of other evidence against evolution, but I didn't bother to dig it up. Also, there is quite a bit of evidence supporting Christianity, the religion I grew up with and stick to.10. It's called the Theory of Evolution. A theory is a theory, but not a fact.

Fantasy is a genre of books, not a theory.

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quote:Originally written by Kelandon:Well, I'm at least pretty sure that Salmon is losing.

If we're already similar to chimps (DNA-wise. I've seen a chimp skeleton juxtaposed with a human one and...man...one looks like a hideously deformed version of the other, depending on your viewpoint), what would the far, far descendants of chimps look like? Almost identical to us? But it's still possible that they could veer away at the last moment to make something new.

For that matter, what does "evidence supporting Christianity" even mean? Sure, there are a lot of churches around. I guess that's evidence that the religion exists. Ditto for historical documents. Big deal. All those are assertions made by men, perhaps inspired by a "divine" crack dream of sorts, but all they support are the existence of a religion focused on Jesus of Nazareth. Belief in Jesus and a rational recognition of evolutionary theory are not mutually exclusive, at least for non-mouth breathers.

And you have a theory which is more likely, do you?Face it, we can't know for sure what happened in the past. It's impossible unless you were there yourself and can remember perfectly. All we have now are theories. And in my opinion, evolution is the most likely one.Posts: 587 |
Registered: Tuesday, April 1 2003 08:00

written Wednesday, February 28 2007 19:25Profile#20
Actually evolution only worked on planets where they get to debate whether evolution works. On all the other places where that infinitesmial chance didn't occur there are no debates.Posts: 4643 |
Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00

10. It's called the Theory of Evolution. A theory is a theory, but not a fact.

The rest of what you've said is pretty openly wrong, but I won't bother to contradict it, because there's no point. This is not a debate that either side can win, because evidence is not the issue.

However, this statement is one that is worth talking about, because it's based on a common mis-conception. When scientists talk about a "theory," they don't mean a theory as the term is casually used (as essentially synonymous with the word "idea": "I've got a theory that the reason that socks disappear in the dryer is that there are little gnomes that steal them"). A "theory" in science is not a fact; it's far more than a fact, and it should be respected as such.

A fact is a single data point: when I did this, that happened. A fact can be dismissed as a fluke. A theory says, "Whenever I do this, that happens." A theory is based on a wealth of experimental evidence, not just a single fact, and the use of the term "theory" does not imply that the idea is purely hypothetical and not demonstrated; it implies that it is so incredibly well-demonstrated that it has moved beyond disbelief.

For example, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity is "just a theory," but it has been confirmed by experiment over and over again. There are still arguments in the details — how it interacts with quantum mechanics can sometimes be problematic — but the overall picture is undoubtedly correct. To rewrite relativity would require ignoring virtually all of twentieth-century physics.

The Theory of Evolution is on comparable standing. It has been corroborated by data from all sorts of areas, and it is so well confirmed that to try to undo it would require deleting virtually all the evidence in twentieth-century biology. There are still some arguments in the details, but the overall picture must be true. Evolution is not a fact at all; it is a theory, so it cannot be easily dismissed.

--------------------Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens.Smoo: Get ready to face the walls!Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr.

written Thursday, March 1 2007 04:04Profile#23
Einstein's special theory of relativity has no problems with quantum mechanics. Relativistic quantum field theory is a hard subject, but it works. It's his later general theory of relativity, which as the name suggests is a generalization, and in particular includes gravity, that gives all the problems. They're severe enough that we can say that either general relativity or quantum mechanics or both, as we now know them, must be wrong in some fundamental respects.

But this doesn't mean they're not both right about many things. So far they have both passed very stringent experimental tests.It's a bit like something like Google Maps. What you see on your screen is a flat map, and we know the world isn't really flat. That doesn't mean the maps you see aren't great, within their range of applicability, even though extrapolating from them up to the global scale leads to absurdities.

So while Kelandon is perfectly right that in some respects scientific theories are much more than facts, still in other respects they are generally also less than facts. Understanding the universe is hard; it forces you to expand your understanding of what understanding means.

And that is what conservative Christian anti-evolutions seem not to appreciate, in my experience. They believe that the Bible furnishes a complete and coherent doctrine, whose every word is unambiguous and infallible. The problem is that they imagine that science is competing in the same market, and claiming to offer a similar product. The truth, of course, is that no such unambiguous, infallible doctrines actually work, theirs included. Science figured that out centuries ago, and now takes much more sophisticated epistemology for granted.

This is why so much of this debate ends up being so ridiculous. Anti-evolutionists imagine that evolution must be, like their alternative, a glass carriage, which will shatter if it takes a single hit. So they point to some little observation here, or some simple argument there, rejoice that they have scored a hit, and wait for their enemy to collapse. They don't seem able to imagine that it is a battleship, possibly vulnerable in some surface details, but built on such an enormous mass of hard evidence that nothing short of an immense catastrophe could sink it.